Democracy Was Anathema To Disney's Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow

Slate  | In the 1960s, after realizing his spatial limitations in Anaheim, California, Disney began to develop plans for another empire, this time in central Florida. (Disney was said to have hated some of the development that surrounded his California park.) At the time, Florida hadn’t yet exploded, population-wise, into the state we know today. The greater Los Angeles area had more people than every Florida county combined.

As a result, Disney was able to make big upfront demands of the state—and reasonably expected the eager local government to give in. His grand plan wasn’t just about sprawling resorts. He wanted to build an experimental planned city, a utopian company town that would serve as a “blueprint for the future,” where residents would test out new products, no one would be unemployed, and the city’s climate-controlled center would cater to pedestrians who could be ferried about by monorail. Disney called this plan the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. To ensure he could enact his vision without a lot of red tape, he stipulated all kinds of rights to the land without knowing if he’d ever need them, aware that he would never again have greater negotiating power.

This Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow—EPCOT for short—is not the Epcot park we know today, though the amusement park shares the idealized planned city’s (now nostalgic) futurism. The EPCOT that was never built was meant to be a real town—and for that to become realized, the Walt Disney Company needed the authority to develop and run a town. So, Florida granted Disney the right to do everything it needed to make that happen, including controlling zoning and regulations and offering public services. Walt Disney’s death is cited as the reason the city never came to be, but the Disney Company’s hold on zoning, regulations, and public services remained.

That’s Disney’s story, anyway. Richard Foglesong, a former professor at Rollins College and author of Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando, says it’s a fabrication.

Disney’s self-governing district, with all its associated resorts and water parks and sports fields and shopping centers, eventually grew to an enormous size.  And though it never developed any cities of the future, the area held on to its self-governing privileges.

While Foglesong was reporting his 2001 book, which traces Disney’s use of its government immunities and relationship with the surrounding area, he dug into Disney’s archives, poring over company documents and memos. Instead of evidence of serious plans for the development of an idealized city, he found a warning from a lawyer that such a development could threaten Disney’s control of the land. If there were real residents, they would be able to elect a local government and establish the external control that Disney feared.